PAX Prime Monday Art Demo - Pizza Delivery Sivir & Community Q&A

During Monday's community day at PAX Prime, several Rioters took to the stage to do a live art demo for a cool community skin idea - this time choosing Pizza Delivery Sivir! Riot Tea Time whipped up a concept art and then Grumpy Monkey started to sculpt a model based on that concept. As a bonus while they worked, the rest of the Rioter's fielded various questions from the audience - leading to several cool comments and bits of information!

Continue reading for more, including a whole mess of picture from the art demo and a brief summary of the Q&A questions.
( Note: It's important to remember these sorts art demos aren't promises, when and if the skin ever makes it into the game it could be quite a bit different. Manage your expectations! )

The show started off drawing a concept image for Pizza Delivery Sivir on the computers...

Then technical difficulties lead to Riot Tea Time finshing it up by hand!

Here's the hand drawn concept Riot Tea Time ended up with by the end of the first demo session.

and here is as far as Grumpy Monkey got before he ran out of time on Monday.

While it's important to remember these sorts art demos aren't promises, the Rioters did mention wanting to make it a reality if it's something fans are interested in and that they'll take it back to the office, improve on it, and hopefully find a place in game for it.

Q&A Session

During this art demo, Riot invited summoners to ask any questions they might have about skins, gameplay, animation, art, or whatever else. I took some notes and tweeted about a few of them, here's a short recap of some of the more interesting answers!

( Note: These questions and answers aren't verbatim, just summaries )

Q: What are you guys going to do to Sion?

A: Gameplay wise, Morello said that Sion will be AD and not AP, as AP has almost no interaction. Morello also mentioned really wanting to play up Sion being a zombie / undead.

Grumpy Monkey threw out a slew of cool ideas for what Sion could be thematically - he talked about where Sion belongs in Noxus as a badass axe dude when a character like Darius already exists. He spit balled the idea that Sion could be something like an ancient, undead Noxus legend, maybe a weird sort of role model for the Noxus society - saying "imagine if Darius sort of looked up to Sion s a kid". He talked about the idea giving Sion antiquated and prototype versions of the Noxus battle armor too.

Q: Will you ever fix Master Yi?

A: Morello commented about balance vs balanceability - saying the old Yi kit was unable to be properly balanced since hie abilities were so binary based on AD Yi using two of the moves vs AP Yi using the other two and neither spec being able to truly utilize his entire kit. New Yi might be strong but numbers can be messed with and changed without sacrificing his identity.

Q: Can you please not update Vancouver Amumu if you ever VU Amumu? It is the perfect skin already.

A: We know the players who have been playing that long to have a skin as rare as Vancouver Amumu are attached to it and we wouldn't mess with them too much during a visual update - just more polish.

Q: Can we get a cool new Poppy skin?

A: Morello reminded everyone champions who need VU won't get a skin until after the updates. He also talked about Poppy needing heavy work in both visual and gameplay department.

Q: When will we get some sexy skins for the ladies to enjoy?

A: Grumpy Monkey actually revealed he made a concept for a sexy fireman Graves. He seemed really into it.

Q: Not really a Q but Phreak started talking about mastery changes and Feral Pony jumped in to share.

A: Feral Pony mentioned removing the improved summoner spell masteries in S4. He also talked about focusing the higher tree points in late game and the early tree points in early game so, for example, a 21-9-0 build is more defensive early where as a 21-0-9 has more speed and utility but by late game they would duel evenly since they both went 21 in offensive.

Q: Is Ryze getting any visual work?

A: Grumpy Monkey noted yep and that a model is actually already done.

Q: Anything on Heimerdinger?

A: Feral Pony had a few comments - mostly saying that Heimer's tentative updated build can place three turrets that don't have a limited duration and there is a CHANCE he might be able to place all three at level one. He also noted the missiles are getting a cool change but didn't give any specifics.

Q: Is anything being done for Taric?

A: Yep, he's on the list. IronStylus also talked a bit about preserving the communities perception of a champ vs the original goals - Pink Taric being fabulous as an example.

Q: Will X champion get a skin soon?

A: Grumpy Monkey noted every champion has a skin somewhere in development - some have to wait for visual updates but they all have something cookin'

Q: < Something about poros >

A: IronStylus - "If you don't like poros, you are wrong"

Q: Any plans for Ashe?

A: Few of the Rioters chatted she could maybe use some touch ups to fix the "few clothes in cold weather" kinda thing she has going on but nothing like that is planned. Grumpy Monkey mentioned her next skin is bad ass.

Q: Will we ever see new maps, maybe something like capture the flag or another 5v5 map similar to summoner's rift - such as the original Magma Chamber concept?

A: Morello noted that he's not a big fan of adding more maps as he feels that team comps and champions should add variety to the game, not necessarily the maps. He warned adding more maps just runs the risk of fragmenting the player base if things are too similar without adding much value.

He used a good example of "Basketball only has one map and it's a great game"

If you missed the rest of our PAX Prime 2013 coverage, check out the links below to get caught up!